Jaypatrol

Here we are camping at Roxby Downs. We are certainly in the outback now.
After we left Port Augusta yesterday, we headed toward Woomera. The scenery along the way is awesome with vast areas of outback landscape. We stopped off at a roadside stop and took some photos for the album. This stop had a lot of information boards and a great view of the Flinders Ranges in the distance.
We traveled along the road and I vowed never to say again that the Geelong to Melbourne road is boring.

On reaching Woomera, we pulled in to look at the various exhibits on the roadside. This is very educational. There is even the remnants of Australias first satelite in the display. We then went to the information centre and we decided to check out the museum whilst we were there. This is about the early days of the Woomera base and the reasons for setting up this area in the first place. We learned a lot about the area from this display, it was so informative and included different aspects of the base; including original rockets, satelites, plane fuselages etc.

After having lunch when we got back to the car, we continued our journey to Roxby Downs and checked into the Caravan Park that we had booked into a few days earlier. Lindy followed us and we met up again a couple of hours later in the Park.

We have really enjoyed her company and all the information she has shared with us. She really is the highlight of our trip to date.

Today after Arthur saw the doctor, (He has hurt his back and now has sciatica ), all three of us headed out to Andamooka. This was such an eye opener. This township has sprung up because of the opal mining in the area. Andamooka supports about 50 full time miners. The area has no city or town council and there are no made roads, or even any rates to pay. There aren’t any building regulations either. So the township is a most interesting one. We stopped off at the supermarket to buy some lunch; that was an interesting exercise in itself.

We then visited the ‘Bottle House’ and took some photos had a look at some different opals in the store. These were lovely and the lady behind the counter explained the different ways they prepare them for sale. The one I liked the most was a large pale blue stone that was on sale for $100.000. A bit out of our league.

After leaving the shop we went to the local cemetery. This is quite a small one and it is interesting to note that a lot of the graves were very simple with very little information on the headstone, if they did have one. Most didn’t have a birthdate, only the date of death. A couple of the graves had opal on the grave and quite large pieces of it at that.

After leaving the cemetery, we drove to another opal shop after a recommendation. The lady here was certainly a character. Her father was a miner in the area over 50 years ago and she had returned to find his original mine. Unfortunately, there were very few or no records in those days and she still has not found it after 4 years. She loves the area and intends to stay and work her own mine anyway. Her sons have been doing all the heavy work for her, but they had decided to try somthing new and have gone away to work as jackaroos. This poor lady is on her own and misses her young boys a lot.

We finally decide to head back to the camp. On the way back we came across 2 wedge-tailed eagles feeding on roadkill of kangaroo. We turned around and went back to get some photos of them. Lindy also took some video.

We headed homeward again. For our happy hour before Lindy retired early as she heads to Coober Pedy tomorrow as she is booked into a tour and the mail run tour the following day. We will meet up with her again when we arrive there the following day. We are booked into a tour of the mine here in Roxby tomorrow and then we will head off early on Wednesday morning for Coober Pedy. We are booked in for the mail run on the 29th, so we will be there for at least 6 days before heading to Alice Springs.

Update: We went on the tour of the BHP Copper mine at Roxby Downs. This is such a massive place. It is mostly mined underground. Their main purpose for mining here is for the Copper. But they also get Gold, Silver and Uranium. Though the Uranium is of lower quality from here.

It was a very informative tour and opened our eyes to how they sort out the different minerals that they collect from the mine. Interesting indeed.

To be continued…

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 25th, 2006 at 1:38 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.